Backups failing -196 error within backup window Netbackup 7.1

I'm struggling to find out why my exchange backups are failing each week/month end, when the daily backups are working fine. The week/month end backups had been fine up until a few weeks ago and as far as I know, other than finishing migrating users to ex2010, nothing has changed.

I'm using Netbackup 7.1.0.3 on the Master and Media servers, and the client on my ex servers is 7.1.0.3 as well.

The window that it is using runs from a Friday at 19:00 till Saturday into Sunday midnight.

This is the first and last attempts of this client for the last weekend. There were 12 failures in total. I have had a look at the Global Attributes on the master server and I can't see anything wrong there or with the storage units (as per related forum discussions).

Other backups have managed to complete (on different policies) to this disk pool and storage unit without any issues.

Your weekly and monthly

Your weekly and monthly schedules are calendar based .. so do bear in mind that your window crossing midnight may not be valid as if it is set to run on a Friday then it only actually has from 7pm Friday to midnight to work - any window after that is not valid as saturday and sunday are different days as far a calendar scheduling goes

Having said that your jobs seem to fail quicker than that which does suggest a possible schedule corruption

So i would suggest trying the following:

1. delete the current schedules

2. create new schedules that are set to run on 1st Saturday for the Monthly and all other Saturdays for the Weekly backups

3. Set the start window from 00:10 on Saturday to 23:50 on Saturday (no point in wrapping to ther days with calendar based scheduling unless you allow to run after rundday which just causes other issues)

As I said, the window for

As I said, the window for this schedule on this policy is Friday 19:00 till Saturday 00:00 as shown below:

Part of the problem is that no child jobs are created, so I have nothing more to go on. I have checked the event veiwer on both the EX server with the dag and on the master NBU server and there is nothing that is at the time that these jobs are starting or finishing, or anything else which jumps out at me as being related - no errors & no warnings.

The schedules for daily and

The schedules for daily and weekly use the same storage group, the monthy does use the same physical storage group but is on a different slp. I will have to check when I can try a manual monthy backup. These are production servers and in heavy use, but I will let you know the outcomes of the manual attempts and commands as requested when I have them.

The daily backups completed as normal last night, I will see if I can run a manual weekly or monthly full later today, but does the above shed any light on why I should be getting a 196 error 90 seconds after the parent job starts with no child jobs created, all while within the backup window?

Your weekly and monthly

Your weekly and monthly schedules are calendar based .. so do bear in mind that your window crossing midnight may not be valid as if it is set to run on a Friday then it only actually has from 7pm Friday to midnight to work - any window after that is not valid as saturday and sunday are different days as far a calendar scheduling goes

Having said that your jobs seem to fail quicker than that which does suggest a possible schedule corruption

So i would suggest trying the following:

1. delete the current schedules

2. create new schedules that are set to run on 1st Saturday for the Monthly and all other Saturdays for the Weekly backups

3. Set the start window from 00:10 on Saturday to 23:50 on Saturday (no point in wrapping to ther days with calendar based scheduling unless you allow to run after rundday which just causes other issues)

Hi thanks Mark and

We use the recuring weekdays option, have run after runday, and then exclude the days that would otherwise cause the scheduels to clash with each other. I'm going to run a weekend job tonight so I can see what happens, if anything and I'll let you know the results.

Hi again,
After making no

After making no changes I manually ran the weekly backup schedule last night and this completed without any errors, all the child jobs started as they should, took an appropriate amount of time and all the databases and dag were captured. I'm concerned as the error doesn't seem to have much explanation but am happy that it's working...

I would say that it was down

I would say that it was down to schedule corruption as the jobs failed within a minute of starting so couldn't possibly be outside of their backup window - I do still stand by my advice on the best way to use the calendar scheduling to make it work well and not need any exclude dates adding

Glad it is solved for you anyway - dont forget to close off the thread if possible by marking the advice that helped the most as the solution to assist other with a similar issue in the future